Events

Event Description

Politics of the Past and Politics of the Future: Autocrats rise in times of high anxiety. They promise to assuage the anxieties in exchange for people handing over their political agency. Contemporary autocrats specifically promise to return people to an imaginary past when life was predictable and felt safe. The only way effectively to counteract a politics of the past is by conjuring an inspiring politics of the future. What could that look like, and do we see signs of this kind of politics if we look closely enough?

M Gessen is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and the winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for opinion writing. Prior to this role, they were a staff writer for The New Yorker. Their writing specializes in democracy, authoritarianism, gender and human rights. They are the author of eleven books, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017.